Game of Kings

by Michael Weinreb

  That virtually all eight boys would rather play speed chess and Texas Hold ’Em and subsist in the biosphere all day long does not matter to Mr. Weiss. Most of the time, his approach is laissez-faire: Curfew is supposed to be at eleven this week, but already enforcement has been lax, which is fine with Oscar. (“In order to win, we need our freedom,” he says. “We need to play cards. We need to stay up later.”) Yet just this once, now that they’ve come this far, he’s going to show them something they can’t see in Brooklyn. “Where we’re going is Appalachia,” he is saying. “It’s not Nashville. Nashville is a city. Nashville is multicultural. But down there, you’re not just representing your school, and you’re not just representing New York City. You’re representing your race.”

  They sit on a cluster of plush sofas within this artificial world, the eight members of the Murrow chess team, and Weiss’s wife and two children: They are black, and they are Hispanic, and they are Jewish, and they are . . . Sal, who is none of above, although it might be argued that Sal is an altogether unique species. “I think you’re the only one they might like down there,” Mr. Weiss says to him.

  “I’m not Protestant,” Sal says.

  The van careens southward on Interstate 24, past Smyrna and Murfreesboro and Gossburg and Beechgrove and Hoodoo, through a torrential rainstorm, past the Jack Daniel Distillery and the Busy Corner Truck Stop and a Wal-Mart and billboards for Big Daddy’s Outdoors and Davy Crockett’s Roadhouse, just shy of the northern border of Alabama, before it reverses course, heading north onto State Route 28, past a trailer park and a roadhouse saloon and then . . . well, where did Whitwell go, exactly? How did they miss it? Was that the whole town? So back goes the van one more time, this time making a right onto Spring Street, and a right onto Main Street, and here they are, at Whitwell Middle School, a low-slung building located across the street from three separate churches, in the middle of—in the middle of nothing . No security guards at the front door. No bodegas at the end of the block. And Mr. Weiss expects them to actually get out of this van? Right here? “They’re gonna get a police escort to walk us around,” Shawn says.

  “Shut up,” Willy says. “You’re gonna get us in more trouble.”

  It is only a short walk from the van to the railcar, which is fenced off and propped up at the edge of the parking lot, with a wooden ramp leading up to its entrance. It is as odd to see something like this here as it is to find someone like Shawn or Willy standing inside it; none of it computes, but that’s the whole point, isn’t it? To somehow bridge the gap in experience? In the front hall of Whitwell Middle School, there is a sign that says ALL RACES, ALL CREEDS, SAME DREAMS, SAME NEEDS, and then there are photos of the student body, which is ninety-eight percent WASP (Shawn and Oscar and Willy and Nile examine the pictures, searching for the other two percent). But ever since the documentary was released by Miramax a few months earlier, the railcar has become a magnet for school groups and tourists, drawing visitors from Florida and Michigan and Canada and from a Manhattan yeshiva, drawing Jews and minorities and people of color, attracting as many as seven hundred visitors in a single month. “You’d be amazed at what happens to children when you just let them go,” says one of the teachers at Whitwell, Sandra Roberts, which is the same sentiment that, two decades ago, led to the founding of Murrow High School.

  The students at Whitwell have been trained to serve as docents, and Murrow’s guides are a pink-cheeked girl and a towheaded boy with strategically placed freckles who looks like a refugee from the set of a Christian television program, and when the girl answers her cell phone, Shawn can hardly believe that the technology extends this far, that they’ve even heard of such things out here in the wilderness. (“I wonder if these kids cut class too,” Oscar says.)

  “What’s your name?” Mr. Weiss says to the boy.

  “Tee-mah,” he says.

  “Tee-mah?”

  “No. Tee-mah.”

  Mr. Weiss shakes his head.

  “Timmy,” says the other tour guide.

  “Oh,” Mr. Weiss says. “Tim-my.”

  It is a small space inside the car, so they proceed through in groups, and they do their duty, walking through the small exhibit, examining the piles and piles and piles of paper clips. Oscar picks one up. Willy says, “He’s trying to steal a paper clip.”

  “No I’m not,” Oscar says. His classmates slide right through, but Oscar stands there for some time, contemplating the sheer mass of the paper clips, stowed in barrels and boxes and in glassed displays. This is the side of Oscar that he doesn’t reveal in front of his friends. This is the sensitive Oscar, the boy who stays up all night reading books, the eldest son who dotes on his younger brother and sister, the boy who has suffered with his own kind of pain for years now, and would like to do something good with his life. Like that time last summer when he volunteered with mentally disabled children at a chess camp upstate. Hardest thing he’d ever done, but there was something to it, something that made it worthwhile. That’s how it must have felt for these kids to do this.

  “Imagine if all these were people,” he says. “Ridiculous.”

  The man standing before them says his name is David, but this David is like no man they have ever seen before. This David is a freaking Goliath. He is built like a whiskey barrel, and he is wearing a pair of Dickies overalls and a floppy-brimmed hat. Perhaps what is most noticeable about this David is that he does not have a face. Instead, David has a beard, a gnarly white thicket, an independent organism that long ago swallowed and digested his facial features. Where the hair ceases to grow, somewhere within the cavernous fault lines of David’s neck, a small cluster of moles have sprouted. It is not easy to tell what’s going on with David, whether he’s the real-life incarnation of a Tennessee stereotype, or whether he’s playing up the redneck persona for the purposes of serving as a proper tour guide at this particular venue, the Jack Daniel’s whiskey distillery. David speaks often of life down here in the “holler,” this place where the men are men and the liquor flows freely. “Is this guy’s accent for real?” Ilya says while trying to decipher this strange new language, and when he’s told that yes, it probably is, he nods. “All right,” he says. “Because the only American accent I’ve ever heard is a Brooklyn accent.”

  “This guy,” Nile whispers. “He looks like somebody from a video game.”

  How they have wound up in this place is strictly a tale of entertainment trumping edification. It is a long way in the opposite direction to get to Dayton, the site of the Scopes Monkey Trial, and nobody beyond Mr. Weiss wanted to bother with such esoteric history lessons, and they saw the billboards for the Jack Daniel Distillery on the side of the road, and they figured, why not? How often do you get to see something like this? So they exited off Interstate 24, stopped for lunch at a McDonald’s, and drove on past Tullahoma and into Lynchburg, careening straight ahead until the air began to reek of boiled potatoes, and this was when they knew they’d arrived. They parked the van in a gravel driveway hidden amid a grove of trees, exited silently, and waited in the lobby for the tour to start, while Dalphe muttered, “I just want to go back to the hotel, man. There ain’t no way in hell I’d live out here.” And right then, David appeared before them, like a character in a low-budget horror film. Now David is leading them through the process of how whiskey is made, dark eyes rolling around in his head like marbles, and Sal can’t even begin to figure out what the hell he’s talking about, what’s a holler, anyhow?

  “How much money you think they make here?” Shawn says.

  “Millions,” Oscar says. “Now you know where to buy your stocks. It’s all in whiskey.”

  David leads them through the fermentation building, past the wide-open stills, where the mash resembles churning bile and the smell of cider is suffocating (“I’m getting dizzy,” Sal says) and finally into the barrelhouse, where David lifts the lids on the vats so everyone, even the underaged, can catch a whiff of the substance that they won’t be drinking for a while.
Too late, Oscar mutters. He’s tried it already, just a taste, he insists, and then he doesn’t say any more about it. It’s not like you can live in Bed-Stuy and never come across a bottle of whiskey, after all; it’s not like they don’t have friends, cousins, aunts, uncles, who drink this stuff on a regular basis. At a nonscholastic team tournament once, both of Sal’s teammates got drunk the night before the last day of the event and blew their chances at any sort of prize, and Sal, who doesn’t drink and can’t imagine why anyone would bother with something so silly, is still furious about it.

  They all get their whiffs: Dalphe exhales deeply before breathing in, and Nile inhales twice, and Dalphe starts to giggle and can’t stop. Before he can help it, he’s got tears in his eyes, and this whole odd experiment has gone haywire by now, with the youngest member of the nation’s best chess team drunk on fumes while being led around by a gnome in a Tennessee holler. How’s that for an experiment in diversity? “I feel mad lightheaded,” Dalphe says. “I think I’m gonna invest in some Jack Daniel’s stock.”

  “What he means,” Oscar says, “is that he’s going to stock up on some Jack Daniel’s.”

  There is a replica NASCAR racer in the lobby where the tour lets out, and Willy and Oscar and Shawn and Nile are toying with the window guard, when the whole thing comes crashing down to the floor. And everyone does what they’ve been taught to do in Brooklyn when trouble pops up; they scatter. They get the hell away. All except for Willy, who seems to recognize that he’s not in Brooklyn anymore, that he might as well be in another country, where people of his kind are not always completely understood. Even Nile, whom Willy has grown closer and closer to in these past few months, whom Willy has taken to calling my son, has abandoned him. “That’s how black people get caught,” Willy says. “They always run away.”

  The van passes a Kroger’s supermarket on the way home, and so they make one last stop. The boys wander from one spacious aisle to the next, savoring the elbow room in a supermarket so huge that it wouldn’t fit anywhere in Brooklyn, and sweeping junk food into their carts: sugared soda, Twinkies, Gatorade, provisions for sustaining energy throughout three days of non-stop chess. “These can’t be that cheap,” Oscar says. He’s trying to conserve the money he has, and he’s squinting at a box of cookie-dough-flavored Pop Tarts, list price $1.75. “I know what’s gonna happen. I’m gonna get to the register and they’re gonna charge me twice that. They’re gonna rip me off.”

  Off he goes to the magazine aisle, where he picks up one of those hard-core gun-lovers’ titles and starts paging through it. He can’t get enough of this stuff. He’s never owned a gun in his life—he’s never even fired one, and hopes he never has to—but he could read about them, about how they work, the mechanisms, the firing pins, the clips, the way all this machinery comes together, for hours on end. So he calls Shawn over to show him one of the centerfolds in Guns & Ammo, and there they are at the end of an odd and inexplicable day, just two more Hispanic chess-playing teenagers from Brooklyn standing in the aisles of a Tennessee supermarket, ogling the AK-47s.

  By Friday morning, the Opryland biosphere is fully transformed. Chess games are breaking out in hallways and on sofas, on snack-bar counters and underneath banana trees and near the banks of the biosphere’s artificial river. Small children are running with rooks in both hands, screaming and chasing each other, accelerating from zero to one hundred, from the contemplation of complex lines and attacks to the mass chaos of hide-and-go-seek, within seconds. A sports bar called Rusty’s is advertising a week-long under-twenty-one party (“Root Beer Floats!”).

  Inside Presidential Ballroom C, vendors have set up displays: Generation Chess, the Rochester Chess Center, Tim Tobiason Chess Supplies. Excalibur Electronics is selling something called Glass Chess, in which the pieces are translucent and light up the board with each move. There are two fifty-foot-long tables crowded with books: Secrets of Pawnless Endings, Taimanov’s Selected Games, Secrets of Opening Surprises, Secrets of Chess Intuition,Think Like a Grandmaster,The Seven Deadly Chess Sins, Easy Guide to the Sicilian Schweringen, The Complete Sveshnikov Sicilian, Challenging the Sicilian With 2.a3!? There are all three volumes of Mikhail Botvinnik’s best games. There is a display from a company called My Chess Photos, which has come up with the sly marketing idea of photographing every child at this week’s tournament, with the hope of selling their parents on a photograph of their son or daughter looking contemplative and serious. There are Supernationals T-shirts and Supernationals “trophies” with the word PARTICIPANT printed in a boldfaced sans-serif font on the base and there is a chess set modeled after Spartacus and there is a bumper sticker that says HONK IF YOU UNDERSTAND EN PASSANT.

  This is the third incarnation of Supernationals, which brings together the elementary, junior-high, and high-school championships at a single site. As of this morning, there are 5,290 participants registered at this year’s tournament, eclipsing the numbers at the 2001 Supernationals in Kansas City by more than six hundred, making this the largest rated chess tournament ever contested. “And I’m scared to death,” says Diane Reese, the tournament organizer. She also announces, during a pretournament coaches and parents’ meeting, that the Opryland has run out of tables, and that, as far as she can tell, there are no more long rectangular tables remaining in the entire city of Nashville. Then Reese makes the mistake of taking questions, and a man in a yellow T-shirt stands up and begins ranting about the fact that he hasn’t yet received a program booklet and that he can’t find the rules online and he’s been to ten national tournaments before this one and he can’t understand why it could be so difficult to distribute programs beforehand. And Reese is trying to explain how their numbers went up by four hundred just between last night and this morning, and they figured moving tables and chairs took precedence, and then the chief tournament director, a man named Robert Singletary, takes over the microphone. Shortly after he begins speaking, attempting to allay the concerns of the man in the yellow T-shirt, the fire alarm goes off, its merciful whine ending the session.

  Because this is an event, because this is the Super nationals, a quadrennial occurrence of such massive proportions, it could not get under way without a proper opening ceremony (or “opening celebration,” as it is called in the program, when they are finally distributed). It takes place in the Delta Ballroom, yet another massive space within the biosphere, capable of holding several hundred spectators carrying handheld video cameras, a marching band from a local high school playing John Philip Sousa songs, the mayor of Nashville, several honorary grandmasters (Anatoly Karpov, Jennifer Shahade, Hikaru Nakamura, and Maurice Ashley among them), and the nearly five dozen members of the Trophies Plus All-America Team, the best players in the country ages eight to eighteen, who are serenaded by the band and presented with red, white, and blue windbreakers. As the highest-rated players in their age group, Alex and Sal have both been selected; Alex is here, loping toward the stage, back hunched, lips pursed, to pick up his free jacket. Sal is not here, because Sal does not have the energy or the motivation, one hour before his first game, to attempt to search for the Delta Ballroom. So much easier just to stay in the room and lie around and play cards than to brave the interminable halls of the biosphere, and who needs that silly jacket, anyway? That’s Lenderman’s style. Let him have it.

  At ten minutes to one, the crowds streaming downstairs toward the competition rooms are so knotted and thick that it is becoming hard to breathe. For some reason, the tournament organizers have chosen not to open the doors, leaving five thousand competitors and their immediate families trapped outside, brushing up against each other in a swollen and overheated hallway, with nothing to do except read the backs of each other’s T-shirts: Bodkin Chess Team, Pasadena, Maryland: 2005 State Champs! “If we don’t clear these aisles,” someone shouts, a frazzled tournament director, one would assume, “we’re never going to get these pairings put up.” Since no one can actually move, this announcement accomplishes very little, and twenty m
inutes later, after the doors to something called the Ryman Exhibit Hall have finally opened, the pairings still haven’t been posted.

  The Ryman Exhibit Hall, where the high-school sections have been set up, is of the size and complexion of an empty airplane hangar, with high ceilings and long tables demarcated by support beams in each aisle. The floor is hard concrete, and the air is cold and stale and smells musty and strange, like a basement that’s been flooded one too many times, and the air-conditioning vents hum loudly enough to drown out the inevitable murmuring and whispering that occurs when placing a thousand high-school students in a single room. It is a slightly different scene in the airplane hangar next door, where the elementary-and junior-high-school-age students have been paired, where Elizabeth Vicary and John Galvin have chaperoned nearly four dozen students from I.S. 318 in hopes of winning yet another national championship. Over there, a line of police tape has been erected at waist height, and, where that isn’t possible, on the floor. Do not step across this line. And already there are parents poised with their feet on the very edges of that boundary, squinting and shading their eyes and peering off into the mass of numbered boards, trying to maintain some sort of distant and peripheral contact.

  In the high-school area, the atmosphere is more welcoming, at least for the moment: The competitors are mingling in the aisles, and the Murrow boys are trickling into the room, and Dalphe has a fat pair of headphones placed over his ears, and he’s swaying to the beat, trying to blast out his nerves. He listens only when he’s tense, and then he puts the music down and plays without it. Maybe if he has the time he can hit the swimming pool between rounds to take the edge off.